AN evaluation of both the physical and emotional status of all patients is basic to the practice of modern medicine. The advent of automatic data processing has made the scoring and programmed interpretation of self-administered pencil and paper psychological testing a readily available and low-cost addition to medical diagnostic procedures.
Perhaps the most widely employed and extensively studied test of this type is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).1 The 13 standard scales of the MMPI are briefly described and explained in Table 1.
In 1962 Rome et al,2 at the Mayo Clinic, reported the development of a computerbased program for automated interpretation of the MMPI. In a 1964 paper Pearson et al,3 from the Mayo Clinic, presented a statement library for computer diagnosis of MMPI scale scores. Programmed statements were based not only on individually elevated scales but also on